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Tag: Linux

Introduction

Although no one actually is a long-time reader of this blog, were there to be such a one he (or she) would invariably remember dozens (and dozens) of posts about Linux installations. This was most notably between jobs (and while learning another one) and while children were young.

However, now my laptop is my tool and not so much my toy. This tool must be dependable and quick. Battery time is at a premium. Documents are written and shared, hundreds (of thousands) of emails are sent and received, and code is written and ran for both education and research.

Fedora 19 on my Laptop

When I received this laptop two years ago, a Ubuntu installation went on; 11.04, I think. 11.10 came next, then 12.04, and then 12.10. 13.04 came as well, but by the time I had gone through several upgrades the machine was slow. I returned to my old friend: Fedora Linux.

I downloaded Fedora 19. I chose the XFCE spin .ISO, burned it to CD, backed up my stuff (documents, photos, music, videos) and then installed Fedora 19. I was impressed by the nice use of the partitioning tool. I chose the LVM (perhaps not as efficient) due its ability to resize partitions. When the reboot happened, the machine went through the graphical boot process and I logged in with the username/password combo that I had chosen with the install. XFCE automatically prompted me with the option to use the “standard” menu bar or a customized one. I chose the customized one–I’ve used XFCE for years.

If you choose the custom bar, the only thing that I would remind people of would be to instantly add the notification area. I’m a network-manager fan and it auto-launched the nm-applet. I spent an additional hour to figure this combo out.

I added myself to the sudoers file. I spent some time administering systems and a continual entering of root password is something that scares me to death–what if someone sees me typing it often enough to figure it out!

Conclusion

Since, I’ve been using the Fedora/XFCE combo with no hiccups. I’ve installed both Chromium and Firefox (sudo yum install google-chromium–similar for Firefox). I also had to install the drivers for my Brother HL-2270DW printer as well.